DECIDE: Democratizing AI – Empowering Citizens through Transparent Decision-making

Many citizens experience the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) as a process beyond their control, contributing to feelings of disempowerment. Profit and efficiency-driven AI leads to opaque decision-making about citizens, causing distrust. The DECIDE project aims to identify and implement new opportunities for solutions that contribute to empowerment and democratic participation, both in existing AI Decision-Support-Systems (AI-DSS) and in our proposed innovation of Citizen-Support-Systems (AI-CSS). The latter focuses on new AI tools to support citizens in complex societal issues. Through (co-)design methods in developing this new generation of transparent and accountable AI-DSS and AI-CSS, citizens’ values are included and placed at the heart of possibilities to regulate AI. This approach gives concrete shape to democratizing AI. Besides involving citizens in (co-)design processes, we focus on transparency and empowerment through design requirements such as explainability and AI legislation.
In the project, we take an interdisciplinary approach by integrating technological and societal perspectives in six thematic work packages (WPs), ranging from theoretical and legal perspectives to the technological creation of new generation AI-DSS and AI-CSS prototypes, and (AI and scientific) literacy education. In addition to the intended societal impacts, our research goal is to understand how approaches we develop and implement to achieve AI transparency, promote citizen empowerment. We do this through different citizen-empowerment-scenarios (CESs): healthcare, sustainable mobility, societal issues and behavioral change. The work packages thus form a matrix-structure, where inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations take place through participatory methods, co-design principles and educational and legislative outreach. We work together with citizens and societal partners such as NGOs, city councils, hospitals and SMEs to develop and test empowerment interventions for each of the four scenarios (CESs). DECIDE's contribution is thus to empower citizens to proactively influence the development of AI and thereby shape responsible and desirable societal transformations with AI.